“Jeffrey Zaslow, a longtime Wall Street Journal writer and best-selling author with a rare gift for writing about love, loss, and other life passages with humor and empathy, died at age 53 on Friday of injuries suffered in a car crash in northern Michigan.
…More recently, he became one of America’s best-selling nonfiction writers, known internationally for such books as “The Girls from Ames,” the story of a 40-year friendship among 10 women, and “The Last Lecture,” about Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University computer-science professor who in 2007 was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given only a few months to live.”
wow, this is unbelievably sad. i actually let out an audible gasp when i saw the news. i went to hear him speak about the last lecture during orientation week just a few months back, and now he’s gone from this world… it feels completely surreal. i remember getting to the talk a tiny bit late, so i didn’t have time to ask him to sign my book in the beginning. and then after he finished his talk, he offered to start signing things again, but i was going to be late for some unimportant workshop about resume building or something, so i missed the opportunity to meet him. he was such a regular speaker at cmu that i figured i’d get to talk to him at some point in my 4 years here.
jeffrey zaslow spent his whole life telling other people’s stories, preserving their legacies, immortalizing them. sadly, he never did get around to telling the story of his own life. yet in a way, without ever even having to do such a thing, he has been immortalized already. he will live on in his writing, in the words that so selflessly detail the amazing feats of people other than himself. i don’t think anything could sum up what he was all about better than that.
